‘Peripatesis’ is a made-up word related to the word ‘peripatetic’, which is an adjective that means ‘roaming’ or ‘meandering’. I’ve always liked to think of knowledge as a huge structure through which a person could walk, sprint, dive, climb, or fly in as straightforward or peripatetic a fashion as they like.

Here’s are my recent wanderings and wonderings:

Bostrom, N. Superintelligence, p 1-22

The book’s far-ranging introduction spends most of its time taking a high-altitude look at the history and state-of-the-art of AI. After its founding the field was beset by boom periods of high investment and optimism followed by ‘winters’ during which funding disappeared and AI research fell out of favor. Behind the scenes, however, the actual nitty-gritty of AI development continued, resulting in more sophisticated expert systems, better neural nets, and numerous problems of the ‘computers will never do X’ variety being solved.

While surveying some of the astonishing successes of modern AI Bostrom introduces the distinction between a ‘narrow AI’, one with extremely high performance in a single domain like chess playing, and ‘general AI’, software able to reason across a wide variety of domains like humans can. No matter how impressive Watson or Deep Blue might be, they are only able to outperform humans in very limited ways; the real interest lies in machines that are as good or better than humans in lots of different ways.

Chapter 1 ends with a discussion of three different surveys taken of the opinions of AI experts. One survey was on when the experts thought human-level AI would be developed, one was on how long it would take human-level machines to become superintelligent, and another was on the overall impact of superintelligent AIs. It is notoriously difficult to predict when and what progress will be made in AI and so expert opinions were, predictably, all over the place. But the results do hint that the problem of AI safety is worth thinking seriously about.

Goldsworthy, A. The Fall of Carthage, p. 190-196

In the face of several crushing defeats the Roman government elected a dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who would spend his six-month term carefully avoiding engagements with Hannibal, a passivity for which he received the nickname ‘the delayer’. This strategy, while causing much consternation among war-hungry Roman aristocrats, later came to be seen as Rome’s salvation, giving her time to recover from the defeats at Trebia and Trasimene.

Hannibal spent this period criss-crossing the Appennines, pillaging and looting freely. During one particularly crafty maneuver, he managed to move through a pass blocked by Fabius’ army by first tying wooden branches to the horns of oxen and then lighting the branches on fire, sending them into the pass first. The Roman troops occupying the pass believed the Carthaginian army was on the move and so descended to engage. In the resulting confusion Hannibal managed to slip the main column of his army through to the other side, carrying with them the spoils of war gathered over the previous weeks.